Protect Antennas and Wireless Gear from Rain, Basketballs, and Other Hazards with Transparent Domes

Protect Antennas and Wireless Gear from Rain, Basketballs, and Other Hazards with Transparent Domes

We often receive calls from installed A/V professionals looking for a way to mount one of our external antennas safely in a school gymnasium, or outdoors somewhere in an ideal location but safe from the rain.

That’s why we were thrilled to learn of a solution that Dave Kint, Vice President of dk communications, inc., discovered in the course of working with some of his clients out in Colorado: an affordable transparent dome made of special acrylic.

Dk communications is up to some cool stuff, and Dave has high standards. He knew he needed to mount his Diversity Fin and WiFi router in an ideal, lofted position for excellent line-of-sight, and protect them from wind, rain, basketballs, footballs, and baseballs in the multiple school gymnasium and football field venues he has as clients, without sacrificing wireless performance. Plus, why not try and actually make it look good, too?

“Before we found these domes,” Dave explains, “we really didn’t have anything that would allow us to put antennas in an area where it was going to be susceptible to some sort of damage or impact. I’ve talked to other people about non-metallic metal boxes, but, that didn’t really pan out. They are very expensive, and the other problem is that there’s nothing that’s really of adequate size for the antenna to fit inside.”

Dave notes that California Quality Plastics hemispheres are UV resistant, so they won’t become brittle or discolored after years of sitting out in the hot sun. There’s also enough space for dk to include other wireless gear: "We also were able to put the Apple Extreme under the same antenna dome so that we could use that for Airplay connection and system WiFi control of the DSP controller."

Typically, we don't recommend placing wireless devices so close to one another, because of the risk of out-of-band interference bleed over, as well as the metal in the Apple device altering the electrical characteristics of the Diversity Fin.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Milne

Alex Milne was Product Marketing Manager and Digital Marketing Manager for RF Venue, and a writer for the RF Venue Blog, from 2014-2017.
He is founder and CEO of Terraband, Inc., a networking and ICT infrastructure company based in Brooklyn, NY., and blogs on spectrum management, and other topics where technology, society, and economy intersect at www.machineage.nyc. He can be contacted at milnea@terraband.nyc